I was nicely surprised to see Korby Parnell in Milwaukee at Deeper in .NET.  Luckily for me, the one session I had to miss, Scott Hanselman's (I was in my room doing one last run through of my talk), Korby has laid out in detail. But not so much technically as about what an unbelievabley phenomenal presenter Scott is. I laughed when I read that Scott makes fun of VB programmers who comment using this

'//this is my comment

which I do in the demo code for presentions because it's so much more obvious than a little apostrophe.

Scott hadn't seen my demo so it was a funny coincidence.

If you want more tips about what makes a speaker a great speaker, check out Korby's homage to Scott.

I'm in Milwaukee for the Deeper in .NET event that is happening today. Five speakers back to back all day starting with Michele Leroux Bustamante doing a talk on WCF, then Scott Hanselman, my (data access talk), Bill Hatfield and Jason Beres. I hear there are nearly 500 people registered. Wow!

Yesterday I had a great look at and taste of some of the specialties of the area.

My first surprise was the Bloody Mary that had something a little different in it

Yes, in between the celery and the lemon is a sausage. It's just the way they serve them here! This drink was ordered (and consumed) by Chris Barwick who I didn't think I knew until he told me he was OptionsScalper. Oh! I sure know him by that alias! Chris picked me up at the airport and I was amazed to learn all of the brainy things (like F# research at Microsoft's Cambridge UK research facility) that he's involved in.

There was a dinner last night for the speakers and some other locals and out of towners which was "taste of Wisconsin" - all of the Wisconsin treats. The bratwurst was awesome and they also had, get this, Beer Cheese soup. Had to try that and it was tasty.

It was a blast to get to meet Avonelle Lovhaug in person finally and Val the C# Gal too! Casey Chesnut is here and I divulged to him the secret of how I got ink on Virtual Earth. It's a big deal for me that I actually figured out something that Casey the mad genius got stumped on. Probably the only time *that* will ever happen.

Oddly there is a small FoxPro conference here too so it was a great surprise to bump into my dear friend Ceil Silver and some of the ol' FoxPro gang.

(links later)

Milwaukee is a city filled with beautiful old buildings (it was the 2nd biggest inland port city after Chicago in the 1800's. I'm looking forward to strolling around tomorrow to see more.

Scott Isaacs and co. have done an amazing job and I'm really looking forward to the day.

From Chris Sells' blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

Code Camp 5 is only in a few more weeks. The abstract list is looking a little light (although Thom could be just having a hard time deciding from to many?) But it's not too late to submit your talks and certainly not too late to register.

Here are the details.

I'm still on the fence since I have to drive to Montreal on Monday for DevTeach where I give one talk a day for three days. Waltham is about 4 hours southeast of where I live and Montreal is about 3 hours north. So you can imagine my dilemma.

And before any of that, I am on my way to Milwaukee tomorrow for Deeper in .NET (speakin on ADO.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Integration) then home for a few days and then off again to speak in at HUNTUG (speaking on Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0) as an INETA speaker. Hopefully it will rain a few times while I'm gone on the peas and lettuce seeds in my garden.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Joel Spolsky's May 2000 article on the Chicken and the Egg Problem seems like a good place to look for solving the adoption problems of the Tablet PC (remember "Mobile PC" now) which is discussed endessly by Tablet PC developer ("make tablets easier to buy so people will buy our software!") and the manufacturers ("make more software so people will want to buy our tablets!"). [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Now that all three of my DevConnections powerpoint decks and demos are online, I just wanted to have one post for linking to them all.

If you were an attendee of ASPConnections or Visual Studio Connections, you should have password access to this stuff on the DevConnections site.

Otherwise, they are on the presentations page of my pwn website.

On that page, the talk are listed alphabetically. Look for:

1. Advanced Data Access Patterns with ADO.NET 2.0
2. Five (Supposedly) Scary Things About .NET (That don't really have to be)
3. Using WSE 3.0 Today to Prepare for WCF Tomorrow

On that last one, note that I have also recorded the demos associated with that talk. Check this post for links to those videos.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

Some very knowledgable people are debating WSDL first. I think reading these types of threads where you get not only people's opinions of pros and cons, but the why's start getting answered too.

It starts with Craig Andera's post about protecting himself (and the world) from poorly written WSDLs by implementing iXMLSerializable.

This post woke Tim Ewald out of his blog slumber who, as a big contract first proponent,thinks that Craig's proposal is overkill.

Craig responded.

Aaron Skonnard got in on the conversation.

Christian Weyer did too (in Craig's comments) since he's got THE tool for doing contract first web services.

All in all, very educational thread, whichever side of the fence  you are on. Me ... I'm just, as always, on the fence.

It's too pretty out so I had to run outside and take these:

As I get ready to head to Wisconsin for Deeper in .NET, I see that Vermont's Cabot Cheese has once again won a bunch of gold medals at the "olympics of the cheesemaking industry", the 2006 World Championship Cheese contest. And just to be clear, it was the Wisonsinites who run this contest so thanks Wisconsin!

26th Biennial World Championship Cheese Contest  Selected Results
March 21-23, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin

Results for Cabot Creamery Cooperative

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (6 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (3 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (39 months old) Cabot Vermont Cheddar (60 days old) Cabot Horseradish Cheddar Cabot Salted Butter Cabot Unsalted Butter	1st 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 4th 2nd 4th	99.20 98.70 98.20 98.85 99.25 98.35 99.20 98.65	Sharp Cheddar Medium Cheddar Medium Cheddar Extra Sharp Cheddar Mild Cheddar Flavored Past. Proc. Cheese Salted Butter Unsalted Butter

Product Entry	Place	Score	Product Class
Hahn's Blueberry Dream Spread Vermont Butter & Cheese Goats Milk Feta	2nd 3rd	99.60 99.45	Reduced Fat Cheeses Semi-Soft Goat's Milk Cheeses

For additional results and information about the World Championship Cheese Contest, visit:
www.wischeesemakersassn.org

I took this pic of one of the red maples on our property yesterday morning. Kinda gray but the buds are pretty. the picture wasn't impressive in a small format, but it looks so nice big that I have it for my screen background now. Spring is coming. Yay!

So, there was much ado about somethng when Gretchen announced she was leaving Microsoft. I love that Korby referred to her as a Microsoft Legend and almost wrote a blog post about that. She is something of a folk legend (I don't mean that as in "imaginary" though) for what happened when she and Zoe started the JobsBlog as opposed to, say the MSDN "Microsoft Legend" program which highlights some of the best selling authors in our industry.

Michael Kaplan pointed to where Gretchen landed and it's really great. She and Zoe have come back together to create a business which leverages their extreme experience as recruiters to offer assistant to technology job seekers and technology job seekees. JobSyntax. Excellent! Go girls!

Giant breed dogs don't have a long lifespan but my dogs Tasha (12) and Daisy (11) are not only very old for Newfoundlands but unbelievably healthy at their unusual age. Here's a little 8 second movie (only 364KB) of them on a walk last week. Daisy is on the leash and Tasha is in front. People who own Newfies cannot believe these dogs.

Tasha came to me as a rescue at 2 1/2 yr old with bad knees. She had 3 operations on her 2 back knees when she was about 3 or 4 years old. She has been on Cosequin for many years but we switched to something called Cetyl-M a few years ago. Tasha was always athletic. Tasha definitely has problems with those back legs now. If she is on the tile floor, it is really hard for her to get up (slippery) and she is pretty pokey going up and down stairs. But she is eager (and able) to go for long walks and still even runs a little. She's not a powerful dog anymore, but she still amazes us.

Daisy who is a year younger is one of my parent's dogs (they are breeders). All the other dogs at my parents knew that it was pointless to chase stick or a ball if Daisy was around because she aways got there first. Daisy still runs and jumps and chases - very very strong and powerful still. She has not been on anything until about 6 months ago we put her on Cetyl-M too. The vet says she's like a 5 year old Newf. Even her coat is still dark and rich.

It's everywhere it's everywhere! And now it's even on MSDN, too! [read more...]

[A DevLife post]

I recorded my basic "Securing a web service with WSE 3" demo using Camtasia. There are two versions of this.

1. In the 30 minute version (25MB), I spend a lot of time looking at config and policy files as well as tracing and debugging while implementing the security.
2. The shorter 15 minute version (12MB) does not take any stops along the way although we do inspect the trace file at the very end  just to prove that the message was secured.
3. WCF Client to WSE3 Service Demo (20MB, 20 minutes) see notes below

I don't get to take this much time to explain things during a conference, so I'm happy to be able to do the demo in my own time frame. I think I will do this for some of my other favorite presentations.

It's different to do a presentation with no audience, in the quiet of my office. I did have to edit out the barking dog at one point. It's not nearly as fun and I can tell that I sound very different than when presenting to a room full of developers. Maybe I should drink a few cups of coffee next time I record demos. Also, without the conference clock ticking away, I am not racing through the demo which is a nice change. Calm cool and collected.

Next I will record the demo of my WCF client calling into a plain ASMX web service built in .NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 and then calling into a web service that has been secured with WSE 3.0. When that is online, I come back to this post and link to that as well.

Update 4/18: The WCF demo is online. It is 20 minutes long and about 20 MB. There are two important things to know about this demo. 1) It is part of a bigger presentation about writing web services today that can communicate with WCF tomorrow, but the demo doesn't go over those rules. You can see basic guidance in this article that I wrote, but becuae the guidance was in flux when I published the article, please do keep an ey on he MSDN WSE Dev Center for an upcoming article by William Tay and PAG guidance. 2) This is not focused on how to write the WCF client. Although I show a little about how I did it, the point of the demo is just to prove that it works. Again, watch for William Tay's article!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Ken Levy has written a wonderful historical post tying all of these things together. As I have blogged in the past, Ken was something of a Wunderkind in the FoxPro world back in the day. I had no idea how extensive and impressive the rest of his background was. The story he weaves in this post, becomes, in the end, a lovely welcome to Danny Thorpe (if you don't know who this is, it's another great excuse to read this blog post!) who has just joined the Windows Live team.

While I have merely enabled ink in my own controls on my own web pages , Loren Heiny is working n something really cool!! A way to place inkable edit controls over existing text boxes on web pages. For example, in his Camtasia video demonstrating his tests, he opens up Google and can write directly in he google text box, then it will get recognized and converted to text. This is instead of using the TIP.

This is big U.I. problem that many tablet pc developers struggle with. We like the idea of users opening up forms and writing directly in them and having that get recognized. What we lose, though is the editing flexibility of the tip. So the conundrum is how to get these two things to merge!

Loren is using some magic to get his inkable edit boxes placed over the fields, which means that this needs to be predefined somehow for each page. But that doesn't seem worriesome to me. It sounds like his tool might eventually enable anyone to create the definitions for any page and share them. Or the developers of those page could create the placement definitions for their own pages and let end users download them. Something like the how the context tagging works for tablet pcs. Or better yet, anyone could just hire Loren to create the mappings for their pages.

Anyway, check out Loren's post and accompanying video demonstration. Neat stuff!

Last week our neighbor's house was robbed in the middle of the day. I sent an email out to a list of about 30 local people to let them know and suddenly many of those people were reporting back about a number of other recent local robberies. Many of these had the same signature which was the door being kicked in. My carpenter husband had even repaired one of these doors.

A positive effect of this is that we are now planning to have a community meeting about setting up a neighborhood watch and hopefully having a state trooper come and advise us as well. I already feel like the Mrs. Kravitz of Moody Road since I can see who is driving up and down the road all day long while I'm at my computer. There are not very many houses on my road and it'sa dead end road, so an unfamiliar car definitely stands out!

Happily, it seems that the perps of some (maybe all??) of these robberies have been caught, according to this news report in the Burlington Free Press.

This has definitely had an effect on us and some of our habits in the past week. I prefer living in my little fantasy bubble where nothing bad can happen to us.